On the Synthesis of Strategies Identifying Recursive Functions

• Authors: Sandra Zilles
• Venue: COLT '01/EuroCOLT '01 Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference on Computational Learning Theory and and 5th European Conference on Computational Learning Theory
• Year: 2001

A classical learning problem in Inductive Inference consists of identifying each function of a given class of recursive functions from a finite number of its output values. Uniform learning is concerned with the design of single programs solving infinitely many classical learning problems. For that purpose the program reads a description of an identification problem and is supposed to construct a technique for solving the particular problem. As can be proved, uniform solvability of collections of solvable identification problems is rather influenced by the description of the problems than by the particular problems themselves. When prescribing a specific inference criterion (for example learning in the limit), a clever choice of descriptions allows uniform solvability of all solvable problems, whereas even the most simple classes of recursive functions are not uniformly learnable without restricting the set of possible descriptions. Furthermore the influence of the hypothesis spaces on uniform learnability is analysed.